'We feel responsible': Google CEO on 'problematic' YouTube content

San Francisco | Google chief executive Sundar Pichai says the technology giant is working hard to eradicate unacceptable content from its video-sharing platform YouTube but warns not all cases are clear cut.

"The amount of problematic content on YouTube is a very small fraction of the overall content we see on YouTube and how it’s used, but we still feel responsible for getting it right and [doing] better than where we are today," Mr Pichai told The Australian Financial Review in Silicon Valley last week.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said YouTube is using both algorithms and humans to combat problematic content. Cody Pickens

"But when you look at a system like YouTube ... there’s a lot of good information which gets out to people too - you’re educating people, you’re helping improve schools, you’re providing knowledge to society.

"We work hard using our systems, not just our machine learning systems but also our human reviewers, to make sure we are constantly making the system better and getting the balance right."

There are clear cases where content is unacceptable, such as footage of the Christchurch terrorist attack in March, which spread across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The tech giants struggled to contain the spread of the video as users made minor alterations to change the visual signature of the video to get it past the algorithms the platforms used to automatically block the video from being uploaded again.

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"Where it gets harder is when there are people who feel like some content is actually worth being shared and people disagree on whether that content should belong on the platform. Those are the hard questions to solve," Mr Pichai said.

"Ultimately we are trying to reflect what society finds to be the right balance in the context of a product and it is a hard problem. But, I look at the quality of information - we’ve taken content responsibility seriously on YouTube over the past many years."

In June, YouTube tightened its hate speech policies by prohibiting videos which promote one group of people as superior to another based on things like age, gender, race, religion or sexual preference; removing content that denies that events like the Holocaust or the Sandy Hook shooting happened; demoting borderline content in searches and recommendations; and promoting authoritative sources.

Since those changes, more than 100,000 videos and 500 million comments have been removed, while 17,000 channels have been banned, according to YouTube.

Mr Pichai said most videos were removed automatically before they were even watched and classifiers were becoming more accurate, allowing YouTube to scale up human review operations.

Max Mason travelled to California courtesy of Google

Max Mason is an award-winning journalist covering the media sector. He joined the The Australian Financial Review in 2013 and has worked at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Fox Sports Australia and news.com.au. Connect with Max on Twitter. Email Max at max.mason@afr.com

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